New Scientist is a bit of a rag these days, and has been for a while, at least as far as a lot of their particle physics and cosmology coverage is concerned.

To a point, Lord Copper. In it's defence, it covers the whole spectrum of anything that is remotely 'science', from psychology, to biology, to chemistry, to climate, to...particle physics. Every week. Frankly, if you can get your head round all the info it crams in in any single issue before the next one is on the shelves, you're doing better than me.

That, my friends, is the tip of the 'Secret Bankers ruling the world' conspiracy theory. It's a classic for a reason, although the reason has been lost to history.

Not entirely. As DeepRed mentioned upthread, there's more than a whiff of 'Elders of Zion' to any 'secret bankers' conspiracy.

Every time I encounter Investigate in magazine racks, I reverse the cover or attempt to conceal it behind other mags. Adolescent, I know, but one must make such gestures to combat the enemies of democracy.

Heh. Every time I'm in the video shop, I make a point of moving 'what the bleep do we know' into the childrens fairy tales section.

It hurts my eyes to read some of the nonsense Wishart dribbles.So I'll read it at my leisure. Thanks.At a glance, he hijacks genuine concerns for his own narrative at one point, and uses Paul Ellis' story pointing to conclusions I wouldn't draw from my quick reading.

Wishart's been running his Soros/drugs stuff for some time: it's in Air Con (fits nicely with Soros as the evil billionaire socialist driving the global warming scam). But when you follow the footnote trail, it takes you straight to LaRouche, and the British Royal Family's globalisation empire, with Soros as Phil the Greek's hit man.

Wow, I wanted to read it, I really did. But I couldn't get past the first two paragraphs that state the war on drugs is a given (makes it a bit difficult to assess alternatives I would have thought), puts quote marks to belittle otherwise quite upstanding adjectives and then makes awful rape comparisons.

To a point, Lord Copper. In it's defence, it covers the whole spectrum of anything that is remotely 'science', from psychology, to biology, to chemistry, to climate, to...particle physics. Every week. Frankly, if you can get your head round all the info it crams in in any single issue before the next one is on the shelves, you're doing better than me.

I find it's quite useful for keeping an eye on general goings-on in other fields, or at least what is shiny and media-attention-friendly in other fields; I can usually go look up the actual paper if I'm interested in the detail. It's definitely pop science, but anyone reading it is going to have a significantly better understanding of science than anyone who doesn't, so I'll call that a win.

I don't know that I can back the "tell them to trust peer review" idea of journalism, however; I have read some appalling peer reviewed papers, including, very recently, a genetic association study with a case n=37. To put that in perspective, there has been some not unpersuasive suggestion that any genetic association study with an n of less than 10,000 may be ultimately time-wasting. You're better off getting an expert in the field to explain the paper to you; it's both more helpful and a good test, in that if the finding is that important and they can't explain why it's well or badly-researched, they're probably not very expert.

Although its capital is notorious among stoners and college kids for marijuana haze–filled "coffee shops," Holland has never actually legalized cannabis — the Dutch simply don't enforce their laws against the shops. The correct answer is Portugal, which in 2001 became the first European country to officially abolish all criminal penalties for personal possession of drugs, including marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine....

Compared to the European Union and the U.S., Portugal's drug use numbers are impressive. Following decriminalization, Portugal had the lowest rate of lifetime marijuana use in people over 15 in the E.U.: 10%. The most comparable figure in America is in people over 12: 39.8%. Proportionally, more Americans have used cocaine than Portuguese have used marijuana.

A family friend almost died and spent the rest of her shortened life in a wheelchair after a bad batch of small pox vaccine.Wonderful person and small pox had been taken off the OE vaccine list but not off the doctors list.Ultimately an admin error, just need to be aware vaccines do have risks.

See, I wasn't going to suggest that Wishart was alluding to a Zionist banking conspiracy theory because, well, I had enough trouble with the Truthers late last year and don't really want a round, at the moment, with Wishart and Howling at the Moon.